Primary river, or the subjective rebellion of color.
When I approach a painting by Orlando Alandia I can see how he speaks honestly about his process: layers, transparencies, scratches, soft palette strokes, brilliant or matte pigments. There is clearly no defined aim from the outset or a strict plan. The process is the artwork and simultaneously the artwork is a consequence of the process.
Alandia’s relationship with architecture lies within the constructive structure, a structure of thought as the foundational activity of culture; and at the same time the foundation and support of the artwork itself, the net within which we can find the tissue from where everything originates. It is then when I realize the close relationship between his work and the ancient Andean textiles. It is there where I find the union with the “Der Blaue Reiter” movement not as a mere reference, but as a bridge, a conceptual link that develops across time, and founds what we call culture. I can not think of a defined style that can encircle Alandia’s works, instead I think of the universal concepts that transcend the proximal, or vice versa, a discovery of the divine essence of the universe that is revealed in the subjective layers of color and pictorial matter where form opens as fertile ground. This subjective rebellion of color in the work of Orlando Alandia talks to us in vivid, honest, and current fashions about our contemporary world and the entanglement that contains it, an infinite textile much like the Andean Plateau. An indispensable body of work.
(By Alejandra Dorado Cámara
Visual artist and curator)
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